


i think the clock is slow

by derryfacts2 (winchysteria)



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - No Pennywise (IT), Alternate Universe - Office, Boss/Employee Relationship, Comedian Richie Tozier, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Richie Tozier, Getting Together, M/M, Office, Pining, References to Abuse, References to Depression, Richie Tozier Has ADHD, corporate bitchboy eddie kaspbrak, kind of, nowhere close to canon-typical but just so you know, richie goes to therapy!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22901827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchysteria/pseuds/derryfacts2
Summary: So there was that reason that work wasn’t boring, too. There was Richie’s soppy campaign of making cow eyes at the back of Eddie’s head as he passed, gently pressing Betty for details about his personal life (“I don’t think he has one. He had this awful fiancé a few years ago, but we’re all glad that’s over”), and chasing the incomparable high of a quiet, muttered “Thanks, Rich” whenever Richie picks something up for him from the copier.Richie is a wannabe stand-up comic daylighting as the receptionist at Eddie's office. Eddie is a tightly-wound corporate asshole. They are both disasters. Or: five times Richie watched Eddie and one that Eddie watched him back.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, background stanpat hanbrough and benverly, because this is a godfearing household
Comments: 221
Kudos: 1150





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> here she is. my first IT fic. only six months after the movie got released. there are three chapters to this; they're all already written and just need to be edited. the whole thing is about 15k in total. yes, it's a 5+1, but in my defense i don't know how to make plots happen? also, huge thanks to charlie for all the help! an angle a lifesaver
> 
> follow me on twitter [@derryfacts2](https://twitter.com/derryfacts2/) :) if you've seen my username in your comments section and thought "wow, this bitch is embarrassing," no you didn't :)
> 
> chapter notes: i put less than zero effort into making the office structure realistic; i have never worked in one and i can barely comprehend that money exists. richie is a couple years younger than eddie in this (at the beginning, he's around 25; eddie's around 28) just to make eddie's job status more believable. there is a *very* brief mention of richie's past depression in the form of a dark joke. let me know if there's anything else i should warn or tag for.

1\. August 2018

Money, Richie decides as his knee bounces frantically under his jacket, really makes people weird. This should not be a new conclusion. He’s been living in Los Angeles for almost three years now; there’s maybe no better place on earth to see the consequences of wealth unencumbered by sense. Still, though, the waiting room of this office puts a new spin on it. There are a lot of purposeless stainless steel panels backlit by blue-white LEDs; a lot of glass dividers emblazoned with frosted patterns that look vaguely like paint smears or maybe yoga studio logos. The overall effect is that you’re waiting to get some kind of plastic surgery invented by the CIA. It is not a place that Richie Tozier, who is quickly sweating through the only white button-down shirt he owns, would have freely chosen to spend time in.

Unfortunately, money also makes other things happen. Money, for instance, can also be exchanged for therapy. And Richie really needs to go back to therapy.

He’d even been on time for his interview, too. Stan had been genuinely impressed; he’d called the feat “Olympic.” He sounded sarcastic, but Stan always sounds sarcastic. This was the level of sarcasm that Richie knows means sincerity. But still he’d been left to cool his heels in their psychopath foyer for twenty minutes. Maybe it’s some kind of corporate power move.

Richie (9:21 a.m.)

_Hey how long am I supposed to wait here before I assume they forgot abt me_

_Like is this normal?? Is it like a business strategy??_

Staniel (9:23 a.m.)

_The job isn’t important enough to warrant playing games during the interview. They’re probably just running behind._

_You’ll be fine._

Richie (9:21 a.m.)

_U always know how to flatter me stangela_

Richie’s knee bounces even faster.

Stan was the one to get him the interview in the first place. APM’s accounting department had hired him straight out of college, and they like him enough to take his recommendation about Richie. That isn’t strange: Stan is smart, efficient, and probably really fucking good at whatever it was that Excel is supposed to do. What Richie _does_ find strange is that Stan seems to like them back. As he’d said a few weeks earlier, “I’m definitely not saving the world, but the company’s pretty straightforward. Pay’s good. They don’t do stupid management overhauls. The health insurance isn’t perfect, but it could definitely be worse.”

Richie had sighed from the other end of Stan’s sectional. He’d been splitting time between a sticky-floored hole-in-the-wall bar that hosted a number of shitty comedians and a second, more upscale bar that did a lot of brunch. It was 3:30 p.m. and Richie smelled strongly of mimosas. He absolutely did not have health insurance.

“Ah, the insurance,” he said in a mournful sort of eastern bloc grandmother voice. “Sometimes, I like to hold an envelope close to my heart and pretend that it is news from America about my deductible. They are just silly dreams, but I am grateful to haff this dream at all.”

“That one sucks,” Stan had said blankly, flipping through the _X-Files_ backlog to find an episode neither of them hated. “Anyway, I think they’re hiring somebody entry level right now. You should apply. You could probably get a tight ten just out of boring office shenanigans if you’re willing to bow to the man a little bit.”

Richie _hmm_ ’ed, realizing that the whole conversation had been a setup. That was Stan’s way. He cared for Richie like a velvet rope cared for a crowd, tipping him gently in different directions to keep him out of trouble. They found heart-to-hearts mutually impossible. Instead, Richie tested all of his voices on Stan first, and Stan pretended that he didn’t dedicate time to figuring out how to get Richie to the dentist.

“I _guess_ ,” Richie had said, which meant _thank you_.

Richie has never had an office job before. Hasn’t tried to get one since college. Most job interviews for serving or bartending are fairly to-the-point: have you ever done this before? Are you going to show up when you’re scheduled? Are you a murderer, and if so, will that become a problem for us?

They’d called him to schedule the interview on Monday. He had spent the three intervening days reading everything that every shitty entrepreneurial blog had said to be prepared for. Ten Tips for Nailing that Interview. Three Steps to a Perfect Handshake. Five Interview Questions to be Prepared For. Twenty Interview Questions to be Prepared for. A Hundred Interview Questions to be Prepared For.

 _Tell me about yourself,_ he thinks.

I’m Richie. I graduated from SUNY Purchase three years ago— _don’t say_ barely _, and don’t remind them of your major_ —and I’ve been in LA ever since because I’m interested in the entertainment industry.

_Why are you interested in working for APM?_

Well, I’m—obviously I’m not. You have my resume. You have already guessed that I’m a hack writer or a hack actor or a hack comedian (ding ding ding), and this will be a day job I will physically be at, but will never care about. I _want_ to work here because I cannot afford to pay out of pocket for a therapist, but I also can’t afford not to see one, because as much as I want to stand on stage and be funny for a living, I also—and I hope this isn’t too personal—need to be alive to do that. Finally, of course, I regularly jerk it to the idea of knowing the number on my paycheck ahead of time.

_Why should we hire you?_

Because I do not expect upward mobility in this position. Because I can reach high shelves. Because Stan likes me, and that’s no small feat. Because you all seem a little uptight, and I am a perfect foil for that energy, primarily because I am so good at pretending that I am not freaking out all the time.

_What’s your dream job?_

Go fuck yourself.

_Where would you like to be in five years?_

Nowhere different because I worked here, that’s for sure.

Richie lets himself go fully dead behind the eyes then, imagining that they hired someone else yesterday and now they are watching him through the lobby’s security camera, chortling to themselves about his qualifications. He glances around to see if they even have one, then realizes he couldn’t guess what the fuck a security camera might look like if it was picked out by the same people that brought you “track lighting pointed directly at the fake succulent planters, like they _want_ you to stare at the light reflecting off the glued-together pebbles until you’re ready to commit murder.”

Then, between his very eyes and the plants in question, there passes an ass that distracts him completely. It is small, but artfully shaped, like a bonsai tree. It is hugged by a pair of suit pants that surely indicate that the wearer has money, because no pair of pants that Richie has ever been able to afford have fit him quite like that. The ass gets its point across efficiently, and if Richie is going to be stood up by a job interview, he’s at least getting something out of the experience.

His eyes track lazily upward to the guy’s face, or what little of it he can catch as he zips past. The rest of his suit is equally flattering, waist and curve of shoulders; his dark brown hair is held in check by a zealous application of mousse, and he’s barking something into a comically oversized cell phone. That guy, Richie thought, belongs in an office like a key in an ignition. He doesn’t have crises of confidence in lobbies that look like spaceships.

Then he hangs up, and Richie tunes back in to the world at large to hear him mutter “shit, shit, shit” and drop his cell phone into his pocket like it’s a live bomb.

“—Kendra,” Richie can just barely hear the bonsai man say. “—traffic, my—supposed to be a candidate—”

 _Fuck,_ Richie thinks as the receptionist looks past Handsome Guy and points in his direction.

The guy turns to look at him then, and Richie still has the gall to be surprised by his face. It’s younger than he expected, but it’s not just that; there’s something about the worried tilt of his eyes and the slash of his mouth that makes Richie’s brain zing in response. A string plucked.

 _Do not get interested in the corporate wunderkind_ , Richie tells himself sternly. _Do_ not _decide that he is cute._

But then the guy turns back around without any acknowledgement that Richie exists, which is, humiliatingly, Richie’s type in a nutshell. He can very clearly hear the guy ask, “Well, where the fuck’s Harry, then? No, you know what, I’ll just take him back there myself.”

The guy turns, clearly fuming. Richie feels like he has a Windows screensaver bumping around in his stomach. His hand is just slightly cold when he shakes Richie’s, and by the end of a very clipped “Hi, Edward Kaspbrak,” Richie is a goner.

Not without effort, he introduces himself like a human person, and then the guy begins striding toward the door next to reception. “Follow me,” he says, without a glance behind him.

Dumbly, Richie does.

* * *

2\. January 2019

“Hey Angie,” Richie calls as a little head of golden curls pops into view down the hallway.

“Hi Richie,” Angie choruses back, trailing her elegant father behind her. Adrian Mellon’s office is directly to his left, and Richie bops the intercom button to let him know that his husband and daughter are here before he flips a Tootsie roll off his desk in their direction. They’re nice people, despite the fact that Angie’s sort of a child star, playing the sweet little sister on some Freeform show about mermaids.

“Isn’t it a school day?” Richie says in mock disapproval.

“Isn’t it a work day?” she chirps back, giving him a Shirley-Temple head tilt.

Her father, Don, nods pleasantly to Richie as he shepherds her into her other father’s office.

So the job very much does not suck. Or—it does, but Richie doesn’t hate it. Not the way he’s hated every bartending/table-serving/shit-taking job he’s had over the past couple of years. He’s not getting paid more, if you look at it hourly, but he gets to sit down most of the time. He’s in much less danger of having drinks spilled on him—although, given Richie’s generally lackluster level of control over his limbs, he’s never completely out of the woods on that one.

He’s still not a hundred percent sure what the company actually does. Financial advising for talent management, or something like that? Stan explained it to him once or twice—there are the creatives, who do not have enough practical skills to run their own shit, and then there are agents, who like to believe that they have practical skills but are more like the creatives than they think, and then there is APM, who makes sure nobody goes bankrupt.

Sort of.

Richie’s part of it, though, is delightfully manageable. He sits at the desk in front of the risk department. He answers the phone. He makes sure nobody fucks up their Google Calendar. He goes to the mailroom for packages and the front door for food delivery. He forwards expense reports to accounting, which is technically not his job, but this way he gets to see what everyone uses the company cards for, and he’s nosy enough to take the trade-off.

The most important task, however, is to be an anxiety sink.

Nobody’s ever said that to him directly, but he’s pretty sure it’s why he got the job. He’d been interviewed by some vague management goon in a suit and a pleasant-looking woman named Carol, who was leaving the position to move to Washington. The suit had asked all the questions he’d been ready for, and it was okay, but not great.

Carol had withheld any remarks until the end of the interview, when she had looked keenly at Richie’s resume, then up at his face. “You’ve been working in the service industry for the past few years?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Richie answered, then cringed. _Ma’am?_ He was a _northern_ hick, for fuck’s sake. Where did _ma’am_ come from? “Uh, I know it’s probably not a traditional background for this type of job, but, you know, made me a fantastic multitasker. And I’m very good with people.”

“Sure,” Carol had murmured, setting the paper down on the desk and tapping it with one frosty-pink fingernail. “Stanley Uris tells me you also do comedy.”

The suit looked a little surprised. Richie understood suddenly that Carol was by far the most powerful person in the room, and he laughed uncomfortably. “Well, you know L.A., everyone moonlights as something. And I obviously didn’t move here to model.”

Carol had given him a thoughtful glance and a half-smile, but let the joke die without dignity. “What do you do if someone heckles you?”

The clock had ticked so loudly into the boardroom that Richie wanted to rip it off the wall. “You mean, like, if I’m onstage?”

“Yes, I think so,” Carol said, leaning back in her chair. “How do you handle that?”

“Well, you know, you give it back to ‘em a little bit.” Richie wasn’t sure how honest to be. “I mean, sometimes people are genuinely mean or they’ve been overserved or something, and you just try to make a joke about it directed to the rest of the audience. But a lot of the time people are just kind of trying to participate or get a little attention or whatever, so you do some back-and-forth, make fun of them for a minute, and they’re happy.”

“Interesting,” Carol had said. “And that doesn’t throw you off?”

“Not really?” The sweat was surely through all five layers of Richie’s suit jacket by now. “I mean, no. Not anymore. It’s kind of part of the job.”

“Well, thank you for coming,” she’d said abruptly, and within seconds he’d found himself blinking into the bright sunlight on the sidewalk out front, sure that he wasn’t going to get it.

But he did.

Richie’s desk is the first and only line of defense between five very high-strung risk analysts and the world they get paid six figures to worry about. There’s Adrian to his left, who is handsome and tense in a sort of ambitious frat-boy way. In the office behind Connor is Lisa Albrecht, who wears the most expensive Fitbit they sell and has, you know, the rest of the personality that goes with that. Directly behind Richie is Harry Metcalf, the risk VP or something equally corporate-sounding, who is, to put it lightly, a complete dud. As far as Richie can tell, he does nothing, but he still constantly looks like he’s about to have a heart attack about it. Then there’s Betty Ripsom, who he might like the most out of all of them. She at least takes one of the Tootsie rolls from his desk sometimes.

And of course, there’s—well.

“I changed that flight to San Antonio,” Eddie Kaspbrak half-yells as he burns rubber out of his office door and down the hallway to the break room. Richie, having already memorized this dance from six months of experience, waits impatiently.

Sure enough, Eddie comes back around the corner within a few seconds, holding an awful-looking Whole Foods salad in one hand and a protein shake in the other. “If I take off at ten, the TSA PreCheck line will be practically as long as the regular one. And I’m not flying in anything made by Boeing if I don’t have to.”

“Totally sensible,” Richie replies in his very best customer service voice.

Here is a joke that Richie added to his set recently: _I think God fucked up a little, with my sexuality. Not the gay part. I know that was on purpose because he also made me get along really well with my mom. No, I mean the big man was at his, like, celestial toolbench, holding the boner wire in one hand, and then one of the angels was like, hey, did you mean to make duck dicks look like this? And then when he turned back, he forgot where he was, and he was like “I’ll just weld this to the annoyance circuit and see what happens.” So now whenever someone, like, cuts me in line at the grocery store, I just—boi-oi-oi-oi-oing. You know? I’ll be behind the bar at 1 a.m. fucking swamped ‘cause the other bartender took shrooms earlier and is trying to teach the limes to do math or whatever, and some guy will order a mojito, which takes about a month to make, and i’ll just be furiously muddling the mint like—_ he makes a vaguely suggestive mortar-and-pestle motion— _fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck...me? Anyway, the moral of the story is don’t heckle me because I_ will _try to dry-hump you._

He sighs and adds a couple of lines to the sticky note on his computer desktop labeled “HRH,” grabbing a quick sideways glance at Eddie’s retreating form before his office door closes again. Knowing that there’s a stick up there doesn’t ruin the view. Unfortunately, if Richie’s being honest, Eddie’s ferocious commitment to being a pain in the ass is part of his appeal. It’s the suggestion of standards. He’s like a mean cheerleading coach or something.

On his first day, he’d walked past Richie without looking anywhere near his desk, and he’d spent two hours in his office before he seemed to notice him at all. He’d stopped in surprise and blinked once before saying, with a flat kind of disapproval, “You’re the new Carol.”

“Yes?” Richie had said. “I mean, I’m Richie. Tozier. But yeah, I’m Carol’s replacement. It’s not very convincing yet, but give me a month or two and a decent wig and you won’t be able to tell the difference.”

Eddie hadn’t laughed, hadn’t even acknowledged the joke beyond a deepening furrow between his brows. “You really go by _Richie?_ ” he said instead.

Richie, who did not want to get fired that quickly, just smiled and nodded.

So yes, out of all five walking cases of IBS under Richie’s care, Eddie is by far the most difficult to please. It’s annoying because Richie knows that he can be charming when he tries, and _goddammit_ , he’s been trying. If the man would just break, just do anything besides act like a human bottle of multivitamins, Richie is sure he’d stop being so obsessed with him. But he hasn’t. No matter how cheerfully Richie complies with his demands.

It’s manageable, though. The whole job is manageable.

And then all three Mellonses come bursting out of Adrian’s office.

Richie knows immediately that something has gone wrong. There aren’t any theatrics, but he can see that Angie is valiantly trying to keep her little round face from crumpling up, and Don looks like he’s made of migraines. Adrian’s usual aura of “teetering on the brink of panic” has tipped decisively toward disaster.

“What’s up, what happened?” Richie asks, eyes bouncing between all three of them to find the most collected one.

“It’s not a big deal, really, it’s just—photographers, out front,” Don says. “Which is normally fine, but—well, last week, a couple of ‘em scared the shit out of her when she was out with a friend.”

He pitches his voice low on _shit,_ the way parents do. Angie is eleven, but Richie is reminded of exactly how little that is when the first panicky tear escapes over her right cheek. He nods tightly, picking up the phone and sandwiching it on his shoulder. “Yeah, Adrian told me about that. Uh, I think they’re probably here because Audra Levine is in the building somewhere today. Let me see about getting security for you.”

Connor has dipped back into his office to peek out the window again. “Can you go out the back?” he calls loudly.

“I guess I could, but—” Don mouths _fuck_ behind Angie’s head. “I parked the car right across the street. There was a spot open, it didn’t seem like a big deal; I’m sorry, honey—”

“Goddammit—I mean, it’s fine, we’ll figure it out—”

Richie has just been patched through to the desk downstairs when Eddie’s door opens with a dramatic _whoosh_ of displaced air. “What is _happening_ out here?” he demands.

“Someone’s getting papped downstairs and we’re just trying to figure out how to get to the car,” Don explains, and Eddie huffs in disbelief.

“I think Vince downstairs can get you out the back and take you—” Richie starts to say.

“God _dammit!_ ” Eddie interrupts, apparently unaware of the pre-teen who is now actively sobbing in their midst. “It’s, like, the middle of the day! How can the economy possibly sustain a bunch of leeches like that during the work week? It’s ridiculous, it’s like _just get a—”_

“Yeah, Kendra, sorry, can you say that again?” Richie says into the phone.

Somehow the tirade is now directed at Richie, for no apparent reason other than the fact that he’s there: “—it’s like what happened to fuckin’ Princess Di, and we’re in L.A., of all places, every third person is famous, you know, like get a _life—_ ”

Adrian looks like he needs an inhaler; Angie’s face has gone blotchy. Richie still can’t hear the other end of the line properly. He finally covers the receiver with one hand and reaches out to snap with the other. “Hey _Kaspbrak!”_ he hisses, and Eddie looks over in alarm. “Could you maybe not be an asshole about this one thing for five seconds? Because you are _not helping!_ ”

And miraculously, Eddie falls silent, his mouth a little _o_ of surprise.

“Anyway, like I was saying,” Richie continues calmly. “Vince can grab Adrian’s car from the garage and bring it around back for you if you can wait, like, twenty minutes.”

“That’s fine, thanks,” Don says.

Eddie’s mouth snaps shut with an audible click, and Richie glances over. “You know what, actually, hold on,” Eddie says, and he disappears down the hallway at his customary impossibly fast clip.

Inside of two minutes, the noise from outside rises to a roar. Adrian jogs over to the window first, and his panicked wheezing starts to sound a little more like laughter.

“What?” Richie asks. When there’s no reply, he drops the phone into his shirt pocket and slips into the office behind him.

He can’t hear anything distinct from up three stories and through a double window, but he can see well enough. Eddie is red-faced, hands slicing through the air in front of the photographers, letting loose what Richie can only imagine to be a terrifying tirade. His big chihuahua eyes look ready to fall out of his skull. “That can’t be his whole plan,” Richie mutters. Paparazzi get yelled at almost constantly; they surely have infinite patience for it, even if being on the receiving end of Eddie’s rage carries less of a monetary reward than getting the same treatment from Rihanna. They look a little cowed, which is a testament to Eddie’s shit-losing capabilities, but not tempted to decamp.

Then Eddie points at what is clearly one of the photographers’ cars, a beat-up silver Honda parked diagonally in the fire lane. One of the dudes falters, stepping forward slightly, hands up.

“You can’t do anything to the car, Kaspbrak,” Adrian murmurs. “You’ll get fuckin’ sued.”

Instead of keying the door panels, though, Eddie kneels calmly next to the wheel and reaches for the valve stem. Unscrews the cap neatly. Takes, of all things, a pair of pliers from his pocket, and begins to remove the pressure pin.

The photographer stands frozen, hoping to call Eddie’s bluff.

Eddie turns over his shoulder to deliver one last line, and this time Richie can clearly read his lips: _can you afford a tow truck?_

He thinks he might be drooling on the window.

Sure enough, it takes about thirty seconds for the photographers to disappear down the street. The handset beeps in Richie’s pocket to alert him of a call waiting, and he picks up.

“Do you still need that car?” Kendra-from-the-front-desk asks pleasantly.

“Uh, no,” Richie says slowly. Down on the sidewalk, Eddie raises both arms to the retreating paparazzi caravan, middle fingers unfurled like the flags of a victorious army. “No, I think we got it taken care of.”

Somewhere inside the cavern of Richie’s chest, things slide around like attic boxes in an earthquake.

* * *

3\. July 2019

Richie’s new therapist, Kumail, thinks the reliability of an office job is good for him. “Consistent schedule,” he says. “Nothing super high pressure. Can I call it boring?”

You could, Richie thinks. You could, because he still answers phones and emails and sits behind a desk. He is now intimately familiar with the lumbar support in his chair and how each of the little levels under the seat adjusts it. He found a dial that loosens the seatback hinge and twisted it until it let him lean back far enough to fall backwards, which drives Eddie crazy.

But it’s not as boring as he thinks Kumail imagines it to be. A strange number of people in the office are adjacent to fame: Adrian, for instance, with his actress daughter. Mike down in HR is married to Bill Denbrough— _that_ Bill Denbrough. Richie’d run into the guy for the first time in the bathroom, which was only slightly surreal. He was a lot handsomer than you’d expect a novelist to be. And he was _short_. He’d also seen red-carpet photos of Lisa Albrecht on Cameron Esposito’s arm, once, but he didn’t know what was going on there.

And Eddie, of all people—the human embodiment of a stainless steel kitchen appliance—is bosom buddies with Beverly Marsh, a designer famous enough for her PA to follow her to lunch dates. The assistant’s name is Kay, and Richie likes her a lot.

Not that Richie could identify a designer by sight. No, Adrian had had to tip him off. All he knew the first time it happened was that the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in real life had swanned into the lobby with a smile that set Richie’s solid Kinsey 6 back to a 5.5, and Eddie had shot out the door of his office like a kid on Christmas. He had swept her up in one of those been-too-long hugs, arms wrapped all the way around her slim waist, and she had buried her face in his shoulder in return. Her feet lifted off the ground, just briefly, with an ease that made Richie wonder both about their relationship and about what, exactly, was going on under Eddie’s prim little shirt-sleeves.

“You look amazing,” he’d said warmly, and she’d laughed a big nasal laugh Richie hadn’t really expected from her.

“It’s all the sex,” she stage-whispered, tapping the tip of her nose with one graceful index finger, and Richie felt his dignity crumble expectantly, because Eddie had let out this stupid, eye-crinkled, chin-up laugh that Richie coveted fiercely. Once he’d seen it, once he knew it was possible, he burned with the desire to pry it out of Eddie himself.

He’d greeted Kay, then led Beverly and her armful of sushi into his office, leaving Richie alone with his thoughts. Well, almost alone.

Kay looked like a fashion plate, incredible cheekbones and close-cropped dark hair and a collection of necklaces so delicately arranged that Richie couldn’t believe they weren’t tangled. She had settled in the lobby with him. By then, he’d learned of the quiet solidarity of assistants and other phone-answerers, and so he was only a little embarrassed to ask her: “Are they…?”

She’d given him an oh-honey look, head tilted and lips curled, not unkindly. “No, definitely not,” she said. “Bev’s just gotten back from her honeymoon with Ben Hanscom. She and Eddie just grew up together. Anyway, he’s—they’re just really close friends.”

Richie’s brain had lit up dramatically with flashing, whooping sirens. HE’S! WHAT! he’d wanted to shriek. HE’S WHAT HE’S WHAT HE’S WHAT!!!

So there was that reason that work wasn’t boring, too. There was Richie’s soppy campaign of making cow eyes at the back of Eddie’s head as he passed, gently pressing Betty for details about his personal life (“I don’t think he has one. He had this awful fiancé a few years ago, but we’re all glad that’s over”), and chasing the incomparable high of a quiet, muttered “Thanks, Rich” whenever Richie picks something up for him from the copier.

Kumail does not know yet that Richie has a big slobbery crush on his boss, but it’s not hard to guess what he’d say.

Between the two of them, though, they’re mostly focused on getting Richie over the rocky beach of new medications. Within their first few sessions, Kumail had started making noises about getting Richie a formal ADHD diagnosis. Which made sense, even if Richie’s father still referred to it as “little-shit-itis,” as he had since Richie was a preteen. The diagnosis, and for that matter, the giant binder about things like “rejection sensitivity” (which. Ouch), had been kind of an immediate godsend. The stimulants were more of a journey.

Between the late-night gigs—he’s getting more weekend slots now, but he certainly isn’t above a Thursday—and the hard 9am start at APM, Richie’s sleep schedule was already mostly hot garbage. But they’d tweaked his Vyvanse this week, too, and last night he’d slept fitfully until about 4am, when he’d found himself staring at the ceiling with the stone-cold certainty that that was all the sleep for tonight, folks!

And he might as well work on some new stuff—the Vyvanse talking again—and he’s always more productive in that quiet office at his desk, so against all odds, Richie finds himself shuffling into work at 6:30 in the fucking morning. _Without_ anyone threatening his life.

Surely there’s a _Black Mirror_ episode about this.

When he boots up the desktop computer, the first thing on the screen is still that HRH sticky note, although now it’s just titled with a single spaghetti emoji. It’s longer now. He wasn’t hired to be anybody’s assistant, but he can’t stop himself from being a moony idiot, so what can he do except collect little pieces of preference and opinion like a magpie nesting in a button factory.

It’s quiet, dark: the light filters cool and gray through all those layers of frosted glass. None of the humming office machines will kick on until he flicks the switch to the overheads. This is the only reason that he notices the small warm light through the wall of Eddie’s new office. A lamp left on overnight, most likely, Richie thinks, and he moves toward the door.

Eddie’s in Harry’s office now. Turns out Richie’s assessment of their relative effectiveness had been accurate: Harry had retired suddenly with a little encouragement from the board, and Eddie had been swept less-than-gently into the role. Richie heard enough to know it was a rough transition; Harry’d been barely minding a full stove of screaming teakettles, and now it fell to Eddie to yank them back from disaster. Not to mention that, while Richie doesn’t know much about corporate structure, he guesses that this job is not normally given to someone who’s barely over thirty.

Eddie had been less collected, that’s for sure. He had also, in a move that shocked everyone, begun voluntarily asking for help. The “thanks, Rich” economy was thriving—flooded, even.

So when Richie pushes the office door open, he is perhaps less surprised than he ought to be to see that it’s not just a lamp. It’s a whole Eddie, curled up on his couch like a puppy under a blanket that was surely meant to be decorative, deeply asleep.

And it’s such a cliché that Richie wants to tear his hair out, but Eddie looks different like that. He always looks young, but now there’s a delicacy to it. An openness. He always looks worried and furious, but in sleep, muscles gone slack, he looks mournful more than anything. The tilt of his eyebrows melancholy. His hair spills softly over the arm pillowed under his head.

Worst of all, his skinny socked feet stick out just under the edge of the blanket. The stack of them, the collection of angles, and the shoes neatly tucked under the edge of the couch make Richie’s pulse stutter. He actually reaches up to his own chest to make sure nothing’s happened to his ribs. That they have not, in fact, left his heart aching open to the air.

He closes the door quietly. At least once before, he had suspected this had happened: extra mugs in the dishwasher, items queued at the printer with timestamps between ten and two a.m. Still, Eddie’s energy was always so relentless that it was impossible to tell.

He pads quietly down the hall and toward the break room. The sleek, overpriced coffee machine seems screaming-loud in the silence. He’d use the Keurig, but that’s been on the spaghetti note for a while: Keurigs are wasteful and pointless. If you don’t like regular drip, just plug your nose and chug it like everybody else. Eddie, the most particular, fussy man Richie knows, hates things that are fussy and particular.

His phone buzzes with a text. It’s almost certainly Stan, who is getting married next year, and who has the loyalty to ask Richie to be his best man, but the good sense to babysit him while he does it.

Staniel (6:41 a.m.)

_You can’t be the officiant because both mine and Patty’s parents would kill us, but mostly because you’d cry through the whole thing and you know it._

Richie (6:42 a.m.)

_Lmao too late to keep me from doing a toast though huh_

Staniel (6:42 a.m.)

_What the fuck are you doing up right now?_

Richie considers just leaving the pot so it’s there when Eddie wakes up—soon, surely—but some combination of sleep deprivation and the part of his personality based on _Bridget Jones’s Diary_ won’t let him. Instead, he fills one of their bigger mugs, some deeply millennial thing that says “Boss Bitch” on the front, and sweeps together a handful of creamers and sugar.

Eddie is still soundly asleep, but that doesn’t stop Richie from cringing when the mug scrapes a little as he sets it on the coffee table nearest Eddie’s face. He sets out the creamers and sugar in little rows, three and three: he knows exactly how Eddie takes his coffee, but he also knows that he’s got a weird thing about other people making it for him. He’ll politely accept a cup of coffee that someone’s already added creamer to, but he won’t drink it.

Richie had brought it up, once, when they were both briefly in the break room at the same time. He had been sleep-deprived then, too, so he didn’t process how embarrassing it was to admit that he’d noticed it until it was too late. But Eddie, to his credit, didn’t blink; he just shrugged and said “mommy issues.”

This piece of information was not in Richie's notes. But he had not forgotten it.

As he makes his escape, Eddie is just beginning to stir, so Richie cannot risk an extra second’s glance. But he wants to, badly. Just to see if the melancholy falls away from Eddie’s face as he wakes up, or if it stays, and everything else lies on top of it.

Richie (7:05 a.m.)

_Started doing sunrise yoga never felt better my chakras are so aligned rn_

_Maybe i’ll get ordained behind your back ;) spare everybody the toast part_

Stan (7:10 a.m.)

_It’s gonna be a good toast, asshole. Don’t pretend you aren’t a hopeless romantic in a comedian hat._

And if that isn’t a small miracle.

It’s a morning of them.

The first is that, as Richie starts fiddling with his Google Docs, he thinks he can hear the miniscule noises of someone waking up in the office behind him. Maybe he’s imagining the scraping noises, or the couch shifting as Eddie sits up, but he is absolutely sure he is not imagining the short, sharp laugh.

The Man (7:16 a.m.)

_Boss bitch?_

Richie (7:17 a.m.)

_Accept that the shoe fits amigo_

The second is that when the door does open behind him, Richie keeps himself from turning around to look. From hungrily catching a glimpse of that sweet, rumpled version of Eddie that he knows will be impossible not to see under the sharp, tightly-held exterior. He already feels like it’s haunting him. He forces himself to lean into the screen like there is nothing more interesting in the world than the lines of opening patter he’s been workshopping for weeks.

The third is that, as he passes, Eddie does not say “thanks, Rich.” Instead, he reaches out to Richie’s shoulder with a sleep-warm hand, his fingers skipping over the seam of Richie’s dress shirt. Not a confident, putting-green squeeze; just that brief moment of unarticulated contact. Almost nervous. It’s light and probably meaningless and it sets him on fire.

Eddie shuffles down the hallway, coffee clutched in his right hand. His shirtsleeves hang open absently, and Richie stares after them, helplessly memorizing the gentle animal shape of Eddie’s left wrist.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all are really the nicest group of people to have ever read my writing! thank you so much for saying all those nice things!!! here is the second bit, it's a little shorter cause i couldn't divide it anywhere else. last chapter on friday probably? see u then ~

4\. December 2019

“Hey, my sister said she caught your set last weekend,” Betty says jovially, giving Richie’s forearm a drunken little poke. “She said you were really funny.”

He has never worked in a place that does officially-sanctioned work parties, much less bougie holiday ones where they rent out bars far too nice to have ever hired Richie. There are twinkle lights, on purpose, and an appropriately secular assortment of karaoke songs for whoever has enough job security to sing them. The bartop under his elbows is dark and glossy, and the place has that convoluted lighting that makes all the highlights more golden, all the shadows deeper. It’s nice.

“Aw, thanks, Bets,” Richie says. “That’s what they don’t pay me for!”

“What, you been holdin’ out on us, Tozier?” someone says behind him.

Richie’s organs liquefy and fall into his shoes.

He has occasionally caught the tail end of a whiff of Eddie’s cologne, but they’re not exactly in each other’s personal space that often, and Eddie uses a politely light hand with it at the office. Still, Richie would know it anywhere. He doesn’t know the brand. In his head, he calls it “fuckable sailboat,” but that does nothing to keep him from going a little dopey when he smells it. It is strongest inside Eddie’s office. He finds dumb excuses to need to pop in there when Eddie’s not around. All very schoolyard, RT + EK in the back of a notebook type stuff.

So, when Eddie is wearing a fresh spritz and wedging his shoulder against Richie’s at the bar, it’s kind of a lot.

Richie almost fumbles.

“I’m not holding out on you,” he protests. “I tell jokes at the office!”

Eddie gives him a little mischievous sideways glance. “Yeah, but you’re not funny.”

Seeing your coworkers drunk, of course, is also part of the appeal of this event. That’s how Stan had gotten him to attend last year. Richie thinks he probably already sees the less-inhibited versions of most of these people, given his low status on the corporate chain and his generalized aura of hot mess, but there are holdouts. Like Eddie, who he swears has never been close enough to need to look _up_ at Richie. He is sure he would have remembered if this happened before, because it feels like Eddie is reaching over and striking a match between his shoulder blades.

“See, that’s where you’re wrong, because I’m very funny to people who are three drinks in and trying to avoid talking to whatever terrible date took them to a comedy club. I _kill_ with the I-wish-I-were-dead crowd.”

Eddie shrugs and fiddles with the edge of the drinks menu. “Try me, then. I don’t have a date, unfortunately, but I am three drinks in,” and doesn’t _that_ just push the little hamster ball of Richie’s imagination down the stairs.

“I’m off the clock, buddy. I don’t do that shit for free anymore!” Richie brays, over-loud. He does manage to stop himself from blurting the second half of the joke, which is not-yet-formed but definitely had something to do with a handjob.

“Bullshit,” Eddie says.

“Well, buy me a drink!” Richie pelts back, gesturing to the very-much-open bar.

“Fine, but the joke better be good!”

The rapid-fire pseudo-argument isn’t new: Adrian has started calling them the Gilmore Girls because they’re the only two people in the office who talk fast enough for each other. Sometimes it’s about stupid stuff, Richie riffing on Eddie’s kombucha habit, but they also conduct all of the actual business they need to do at a volume and pace that Betty calls “borderline hostile.” Richie can’t help it, and he doesn’t think Eddie wants him to. He’s pushy and snarky and he likes to be pushed back, Kuzco and Pacha climbing up the cliff style.

It feels a little dangerous outside of the office, though. It’s one thing to keep your infatuation with your boss under wraps when he’s telling you that you mislabeled the Excel sheet from the Boulder group, _dumbass,_ but it’s completely another to keep up the same pretense when he’s got his eyelashes flared wide like that and his shoulder pressed into yours, as if he’s a guy you’re perfectly allowed to take home from the bar. 

Eddie gets a G&T and lets Richie order his own old-fashioned, because Eddie knows a normal boss-employee amount of information about Richie’s drink preferences, which is none. As the bartender turns away, Richie tries to work up a joke that won’t get him fired or arrested, and then he feels someone grab his other shoulder.

“Rich!” Mike says grandly, two or three drinks audible in his voice. “How’s it going?”

“I’m good, Mike, how are you?” Richie says, and Eddie choruses: “Hey, Mike.”

Mike is holding a glass of red wine, which seems proper and adult-ish. It sloshes around a little when Richie asks after Bill and Mike takes an unbalanced look around the place. “He’s good, he’s somewhere with Stan,” Mike says. “You know, he liked your speech.”

Richie feels a sudden need to steal Mike’s drink and floor it. “Please tell me you did not show your husband my speech, Mike,” he groans. “I am _begging_ you to tell me that you did not show a bestselling author and writer of blockbusters my amateur-hour speech.”

“Aw, whatever, he was gonna hear it at the wedding anyway.” Mike waves his hand dismissively, and through his fingers Richie catches the tail end of Eddie’s calculating glance.

“What wedding?” Eddie asks. The angle of his eyebrows more directly ask “who the fuck is marrying _Richie?”_

“Stan Uris, in accounting?” Richie says. “It’s in March; I’m his best man.”

“Ah,” Eddie says.

“Mike’s making sure my toast isn’t too dogshit,” Richie offers.

He’d made a deal with Stan about the wedding toast. Stan and Patty couldn’t read it, because that just ruined the surprise, and surprise gave Richie the best shot at making them both cry. But there was, of course, the ever-present danger of one’s lowbrow comedian friend making a watersports joke in front of your grandmother, so Mike, who read more than anyone Richie had ever met, had been roped in as a neutral party. He would read Richie’s speech, make sure it a) wouldn’t be improv and b) didn’t make any Monica Lewinsky references, and let Stan know that their wedding wasn’t going to blow up in anyone’s face.

The bartender sets their drinks down, and Richie points them toward a little tabletop outside of the main crush of people at the bar. His drink is sweating almost as much as he is.

“It’s not dogshit at all, by the way,” Mike says, when the three of them can all hear each other again. “I wouldn’t have shown it to Bill if it was.”

He has that knowingly casual look in his eyes, like he is too kind to reveal that he knows how much Richie needs this.

Richie looks down at the table, at Eddie’s fingers toying with his cocktail stirrer, then studiously into his own drink. “Aw geez, mithter, you mean it?” he says.

“We both got a little teary, man,” Mike says sincerely. “It’s very sweet. You could go into romance novels if comedy doesn’t work out.”

“Well, as long as I can write a bunch of Viking sex scenes.” He hears Eddie huff softly into his drink, which makes Richie’s stomach leap against his spine. He kills two thirds of his old fashioned in one swig.

“So, you were saying you’re actually funny,” Eddie says. Richie both treasures and loathes Eddie’s ability to bust his balls.

“C’mon, man, you’re gonna ask me to joke at a funeral?” Richie says, gesturing toward the karaoke stage, where a blond man Richie vaguely recognizes from Mike’s department is making a brave pass at “All I Want for Christmas is You.”

Eddie snorts again.

“Weak. Situational,” he says stubbornly. “You just stand up on stage and roast people for your whole act? People buy tickets for that shit?”

“They do not,” Mike interjects lightly. 

That gets an actual guffaw out of Eddie, and Richie feels all pinchy and competitive, thirteen again and sprinting to the end of the block with his shoelaces flapping. “Okay, trash the trashmouth,” he says, then throws his voice as low as he can. “Why don’t you ask Big Bill what I earn the big bucks doing?”

“Ask me what about what?” Bill says, suddenly behind him, but Richie’s on a roll.

“Jesus, William, you gotta stop sneaking up on me like this or you’re gonna catch me and your mom at it again!”

There’s a choking noise from Richie’s left, and he turns to see Eddie red-faced and wiping G&T off his chin, laid low by Richie telling New York Times bestselling author Bill Denbrough that he’d fucked his mother.

“Come on, a _your mom_ joke? _That’s_ what breaks you? That’s not even the best one I got!” he protests, but Eddie is unsalvageable, wheezing into his glass, and it’s not anywhere near sexy—he sounds like a cat drinking from a hose—but Richie still thinks that the sound of that laugh is going to be branded on top of everything else he hears for the rest of his life, like the image of a lightbulb burnt neon onto the backs of his eyelids.

Another quarter of an hour passes, during which Eddie insists he was just choking on an ice cube and Richie steals a series of increasingly reckless glances at him from the corner of his eye. Then Adrian’s there to goad Eddie through a series of token protests about whether or not he should do karaoke, and Eddie’s flame-cheeked and tipsy onstage instead, leaving Richie to watch with Mike and Bill.

The idea of Eddie doing karaoke would be enough, on a normal day, to make his head explode; Richie feels like he’s flying through space watching him bicker with Adrian over who gets which mic. In his haze, it takes him a second to notice Mike shaking his shoulder.

“Hm?” he says, reluctantly looking over.

“What are you doing, man?” Mike asks gently.

Here is a joke that Richie has not added to his act: _I’ve played a lot of Sims in my life, like any self-respecting depressed person. You guys know the Sims, right, that game where you control a bunch of tiny digital people like the Old Testament god so you don’t snap and kill your real-life family? Anyway, I think everything should run on Sims rules. First of all, the comedian career in the Sims 4 pays $23 an hour. Which, as you can probably tell by my haircut, would be a step up. Second of all, I think I would like the opportunity to fuck the Grim Reaper. Obviously, I’m not going to commit to that now, because who knows how that fucker smells, or if he’d have lips, or if his thing with Ann Coulter is monogamous or more casual—but I mean, if a loved one of mine had just died, and a sexy little somethin’ in a ratty cloak showed up to collect, I might be in the mood! Best way to get over someone, et cetera. Also, you just know he’s like seven feet tall. Imagine being the Grim Reaper and having to look_ up _at people when you show up to take them to hell. That shit wouldn’t work at all._

_Thirdly, in the Sims, you can’t have feelings for somebody who doesn’t have them back. Your little relationship progress bars always gotta match. No such thing as secret beef in the Sims! If you hate a bitch, they know about it. But more importantly, you can’t covertly fall for somebody who literally never thinks about you. You never gotta get down in your goopy humiliating romantic urges unless someone else is doing it with you. No pining! Let’s just get rid of that shit! It’s so fucking unfair!_

It was a horrible joke. Really derivative, and he couldn’t figure out how to keep it from becoming a huge full-diaper downer.

“Dude, I know,” Richie says, resting his face in his hands. He can’t look at anybody while he admits it. “I know, it’s fuckin’ embarrassing, can we _please_ not talk about this? Ever?”

He feel’s Mike’s hand land heavy on his right shoulder. “Sure, man.”

The first hairspray-springy synth chords of an ABBA song rain down from the sound system like punishment from the heavens. Richie adds to his sticky note: Eddie is not a terrible dancer after he has had a few drinks. He knows every word to “S.O.S.” and he will admit that out loud in front of everyone in the office. He is also this person, this loose and laughing seventies-pop screamer, under yet another layer of inhibitions, and Richie still wants to hold his hand like they’re in grade school.

Adrian is wild with it, swinging an imaginary microphone cord as he takes the first half of the chorus. Eddie picks up the second half, a little less nuts, a little more embarrassed, but happy. He plays piano in the air and Richie, despite himself, bursts into laughter.

* * *

5\. July 2020

When Richie had graduated from his awful little backwater high school, he didn’t expect to be excited. He had tried to convince his parents to let him skip; he didn’t want anybody watching him walk across the stage in that stupid robe and hat and clapping like he was saying goodbye to something he cared about. They didn’t let him, of course. He had hung on to the valedictorian spot by his fingernails, skating over the last semester of material with study skills that would kick his ass in college, and the valedictorian couldn’t skip graduation. No matter how many times he said Stanley could give the speech.

Turns out it didn’t matter, after all. The sun had beat down through the New England air, still crisp even in mid-June, and Richie’s robes had itched at every seam, and he’d smiled so hard his cheeks hurt. His speech was passable, but nothing special, a harbinger of Richie’s future as an equally adept performer and procrastinator. His parents and sister had whooped in the audience as he crossed the stage, and he’d given them a broad smile and a flamboyant bow. He had surprised himself by finding a little nostalgia in leaving Derry High for the last time.

Kumail has heard this story several times over the past few months, ever since Richie had—in blindingly quick succession—opened for Booster, gotten an agent, booked two recurring-character voice acting gigs, and turned in his two weeks’ notice at APM. He always nods patiently, letting Richie exhaust himself running at the plate-glass window of whatever it is, exactly, that he’s trying to get at.

“How do you think it’ll feel to leave your job?” he had said last session.

“It’s, um—it’s hard to guess,” Richie had replied. “I’m just—I’m getting what I wanted, on like a life level, and I don’t know how I feel when that happens because it’s not really something that’s happened to me before.”

What about trying to describe two or three options, Kumail had said, and we can talk through what those might be like, and Richie had screwed his eyes shut and tried his hardest.

1\. Happy (uncomplicated.)

Richie grins big and simple as he packs his shit into a banker box, which Kendra-from-the-front desk had handed him on the way in. It has a cute little decorated nameplate that says “Richie” in glitter glue, and that’s his favorite thing, he thinks, is adults indulging themselves in something they would have enjoyed as a kid.

It’s kind of miraculous, the amount of shit you accumulate over just a couple of years sitting behind the same desk. He’s only got two drawers, thank God, so that limited the sprawl of his chaos, but he’s still got tchotchkes out the wazoo. Don Mellon had told him once that he just looked like the kind of guy who’d have tchotchkes, which Richie thinks was just a delicate way of saying he looked like he’d yell at a kid for reading a vintage comic book. Not that that was all that far off. Richie had a couple of bobbleheads, one of those little flowers that did a wiggly dance when you pressed a switch, one and a half cactuses in miniature pots, a movie-a-day desk calendar he pulled pages out of whenever he got bored; he’d even had one of those Newton desk toys with the silver balls in the little frame, but Eddie had confiscated that after Richie drove him absolutely nuts with the clacking. Richie remained unconvinced you could have heard it from Eddie’s office, but, you know. Chain of command.

He’s also got a freaky amount of jackets. A couple that he kept close to his desk or on the back of his chair because he uses them a lot—a thin raincoat that rolled up into a softball and stayed in his drawer; a fleece pullover for the days that the risk psychopaths got even more licentious with the AC than normal. But then at least one person from every department comes up to his desk throughout the morning of his last day, bearing a jacket he had left there months ago and had been languishing in their respective Lost and Founds.

Bev is looking at the jackets in question as she pries cheerfully for information about his future.

“What’s your agent like?” she asks as she holds Richie’s favorite cardigan up in the air. It’s charcoal-gray and kind of schlubby. He wants it back.

“She’s a terrifying lady with amazing shoulders named Steve,” Richie says. “Gives off kind of a rowing-team vibe. And yes, Kay, she is.”

Kay nods her appreciation.

“And she treats you right?” Bev asks, poking one well-manicured finger through a hole in the right elbow of the cardigan that Richie has no memory of making.

Richie smiles. “She’s great, actually. She’s got me going to Just for Laughs in a couple of weeks.”

“So what’d Eddie say when you told him you were quitting?” Kay chimes in, and Bev swats her with the arm of Richie’s leather jacket. Which is just perfect. Everyone can know about Richie and his giant-baby crush on his boss! Fuck it!

“Ha, ha,” Richie says, swiping his _X-Files_ -themed Rubik’s cube out of her hands. “I don’t know, Kay, he must have been notified when I gave my two weeks, and then he got the same email about me leaving as everybody else.”

Bev, who is closest to his desk, turns to look at Kay on the couch, and he cannot see what her face is doing but based on the significant look Kay’s shooting back, he can probably guess.

“Well, are you excited, Richie?” Bev finally asks as Eddie comes out of his office door to sweep her away for lunch.

Richie’s stomach is full of the shivering emotion of the first and last day of school all at once. He’ll get to do what he likes and still see his therapist. He won’t have to wake up at seven every morning any more, and he won’t have to commute every day, a prospect at which he could cry. It feels like every time he turns around he’s in the middle of something bigger than he had remembered to dream about doing. 

“Yeah,” Richie says, smiling tightly. “I really am.”

2\. Happy (complicated.)

They’re having some kind of little send-off for him in the break room at four, but Richie’s still getting a lot of personal visits.

Don and Angie stop by first. She’s starting high school in a month or two, which is fucking nuts, and she’s gone from playing a baby sister on Freeform to playing a middle sister on ABC. She has taken to calling Richie “kid,” and she stops a little nervously in front of his desk on the way into Adrian’s office.

“Hey, pipsqueak,” Richie says, removing the staples from a stack of improperly collated meeting agendas just for something to do. “What can I help you with?”

“I just wanted to say that I’m glad you’re finally going places, kid,” she says solemnly. She has a very dry sense of humor for a fourteen-year-old.

“God, me too,” Richie says, and he gives her a fistbump when she reaches across the desk for one.

Mike drops by, too, and Stan, bringing their carefully-packed lunches to eat on the risk department couches, as they sometimes do.

That’s the easiest way to tell someone loves them, Richie thinks. The lunches. Bill packs Mike’s every day that he’s not traveling, and Stan now makes them for both of the Urises. All three, in the not-so-distant future.

“So, we get free tickets to your first headliner gig, right, Trashmouth?” Mike asks.

“Say headliner gig again! I’m trying to get into horror, and that shit was bone-chilling,” Richie quips, and Mike leans over to steal the pickle right out of the wrapper of his sandwich. Stan laughs at them both.

“Yeah, of course,” Richie says after a beat. “It wouldn’t feel right roasting the fuck out of you both without you there to defend yourselves.”

He means he’d rather die than try to fill his first theater without the two of them there. They understand perfectly well.

It’s not a big, celebratory thing, but quiet and mundane, because isn’t that what he’ll be missing from them? They’ll be friends, he doesn’t doubt that; Stan especially couldn’t get rid of him if he tried. But he’ll miss seeing them every day. He’ll miss the small subdued pattern of hallways to Stan’s cubicle. The look on Mike’s face as he pulls a folded note from the bottom of his lovingly-packed lunchbox.

If he wants to see them, now, he’ll have to ask.

3\. Gutted. 

He runs into Eddie, one-on-one, at around 4:55. Richie’s heading out to his car with one last armful of things; Eddie’s coming back in from a late-afternoon meeting that Richie certainly doesn’t remember scheduling for him. They were so close to missing each other.

Of all places, it happens in the airlock to the back door. Light comes slanting orange across Eddie’s face, and Richie’s voice catches in his throat.

“Last day, huh,” Eddie says.

“Yep,” Richie echoes dumbly.

“Well, congratulations. It’s a big deal. Good for you.”

Richie hates the way they sound, the little pebble-flat platitudes. He doesn’t know what he wants from Eddie in that moment, but it’s something else. “Thanks, Spaghetti Man,” he says teasingly, and Eddie doesn’t rise to the challenge.

He just says, “You’re welcome.”

“Aw, come on, you can’t let me get away with a dumb nickname just because it’s my last day,” Richie says hungrily. “What happened to professionalism?”

“Hey, I’m not your boss anymore. I don’t have to be a professional,” Eddie replies.

“Oh, Eds Spagheds,” Richie says. “What ever will I do if you’re not bossing me around anymore?”

“I don’t know, jackass, be friends with me?”

“You want to be my friend?” Richie says, with a gasp that’s only half-fake. “But you haven’t stopped fucking with me in _years_!”

“Come on, we’re already friends,” Eddie says. “I’m just a dick to everyone at work. You know this.”

It’s silent for a long, long second.

“I’ll miss being here,” Richie offers, which is the best he can do without giving up his pride completely.

“I’ll miss having you around,” Eddie replies, eyelashes caught golden in the late-afternoon light. Richie can feel tears pushing hot and humiliating at the back of his throat.

It’s so stupid. It’s _so_ stupid. A cutesy workplace crush. It’s just two years of pestering Eddie until he smiles, that’s all. Of staring at the back of his head when he passes like a huffy old dog staring at the leash on the wall. Of memorizing the little divots and cracks, of guessing at the things Eddie grew around to be the shape that he is. Of pretending to check Eddie’s calendar when he remembers everything on it by heart, with the devotion of remembering holidays. Of offering Eddie every role Hugh Grant’s ever played: hey, have an affair with me and say I should dress different; hey, fire me and then follow me home and kiss me under fake snow as the curtains open; hey, call me in the middle of the night about stupid things until I hate you and then grope me in my tiny shitty kitchen while I’m on the phone trying to order Chinese food. Stand there, just stand there with your eyes wide and sad and let me beg you to love me back the same big-sky salt-in-the-wound way that I love you.

And Richie has to pack all of that in its own box, close the cardboard tabs and label it, while he stands in the back door airlock. He clutches a box full of plants and his bowl of Tootsie rolls and smiles effortfully at Eddie.

It seems unjust.

Richie holds out the bowl. An offering of sorts.

Eddie takes a Tootsie roll and shoots him a crooked little smile. “Thanks, Rich,” he says, one last time.

He turns to go, and Richie stands, still as a statue, as if he is waiting to be kissed or else struck by lightning. He watches Eddie disappear through the door, and he adores his hand as it strokes the back of his neck. Up the stairs. Gone.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter has a teensy bit more of the heavy stuff in it (like, a brief discussion of bev's marriage to tom and some references to myra, emetophobia things, and a hint of substance abuse. it's all localized to a few paragraphs, though; this is mostly pretty light.
> 
> THANKS SO MUCH TO EVERYONE WHO'S READ! and left amazing kind comments! you make a girl very very happy. this was such a wonderful first posting experience in this fandom and i can't wait to write more :')

+1 September 2020

Eddie was under no illusions about the relative moral value of his work. The world was not becoming a better place because he made projection charts for investment decisions. A more stable one, perhaps, but that didn’t mean better. His own childhood had technically been very stable.

Still, everyone had to do something to make a living, and he just happened to be an excellent risk analyst. Which also happened to be a six-figure, tailored-suit career. There was no way to get around either of those things, so Eddie just generally tried not to do anything Don Draper would do and hoped that that was enough to keep his karma in the black. No drinking at work. No chain-smoking around small children. No fucking the secretary, which was never supposed to be a problem considering that Carol Feeny was a) married and b) a woman.

But life and the deep-set instincts of being a rich asshole find a way, because then Harry had to hire Richard Wentworth Tozier.

Richie was tall and broad-shouldered and had eyebrows that broadcasted his reaction to just about everything. He had romantic swooping eyes behind his Walter Cronkite glasses, and he could carry up catering for eight people in one trip. He always leaned back in his desk chair, very nearly far enough to fall over, and it stretched the line of his body out so long Eddie thought he’d go insane. He toyed distractingly with anything within reach: his jacket zippers, the stickers off clementines, and, worst of all, pens. The pens were the real life-ruiner. If Eddie had not already gone through that debacle with Myra right after college, Richie and pens would have been enough to constitute a sexual crisis all on their own.

It was gross. Not that Richie was a man, although Eddie and his therapist were still having a lot of fun talks about that, but that Eddie had not evolved a single inch further than any other wealthy dude who wanted to bang the person whose job was specifically to say yes to him.

And at first, Richie did that job flawlessly, permissive and patient, nodding and smiling to everything Eddie said. Eddie found himself obsessed with getting that little twitch out of Richie’s eyebrows that betrayed his annoyance. And then, when he got too good at that, with making Richie express it aloud. When Richie’s mad at me, he had thought, when he’s not a windup doll at the desk anymore, I won’t need him to _look at me_ so badly.

When he finally got a rise out of Richie, he hadn’t even really been trying. He was just—he was weird around kids in the first place, and Angie had been crying, and then Eddie had some backed-up issues about paparazzi. Bev’s divorce had been dizzyingly high-profile; Rogan was nearly a household name after his first two model wives, and he hadn’t been shy about talking to the press, telling them the charges were absurd. Eddie suspected it had also been Tom who told TMZ where Bev was staying during the divorce.

When she’d gotten trapped in there, the front entrance too crowded with photographers to chance, she had called Eddie. Of course she had, and Eddie had been in the car in seconds. He always liked playing getaway driver when they were kids. But it was an ugly memory.

So after the whole thing with Angie Mellon, he felt a little stupid, like he’d betrayed some kind of frantic young animal part of himself that he usually managed to keep out of the office. But afterward, Richie stopped being so pliable with him, which was maybe worth it. Eddie had known the guy was in comedy, but now he started sounding like it. Snarky, quick, a little bitchy sometimes.

Instead of making Eddie’s lecherous Don-Draper streak die, though, Backtalk Richie was even more addictive. Once, Eddie had been ranting to the American Express customer service line, and after hearing one too many SPEAK TO A REPRESENTATIVEs, Richie’d put on an old-timey reporter voice and said “Why stop there? You should take it right to the president!”

Eddie had flipped him off, and Richie had laughed, and Eddie had wanted to tear a phone book in half.

Once, Richie had started to nod off while taking notes in a meeting, and Eddie had realized that what he wanted to say—stay up too late with your left hand, Tozier?—would have sounded wildly unprofessional.

Once, when he and Bev were on their way out the door for a date, he’d told Richie he was taking an extra half hour for lunch, and Richie’d said “Yes, Mr. Hilfiger,” because he did that whenever Eddie wore khakis, and Eddie realized that saying “Kiss my ass, Richard,” would have sounded a lot like flirting. So he’d just rolled his eyes and said “thanks, Rich.”

Bev had figured him out anyway, of course.

After her honeymoon and his promotion, she’d insisted on biweekly lunch dates to make up for the fact that they hardly saw each other at night or on weekends. She’d needed four lunches before she said something, which probably meant she’d noticed the first time she came to the office. Innocently, chopsticks trawling through her shrimp and broccoli, she’d said, “So the receptionist is kinda your type, huh?”

Eddie bristles. “Don’t look at me, I didn’t hire him.”

“It’s not an accusation!” Bev says, hands up, very butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth. “Just small talk.”

Eddie rolled his eyes.

She’d let it sit for barely a minute before she said, “But you noticed how cute he is, huh?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, pointing with his chopsticks, and Bev’s laugh bubbles up over him like water over rocks. “He’s not even cute, actually. He looks like a character from King of the Hill.”

They’d been like that since they were kids, poking and prodding and interfering with each other like a pair of baby monkeys. They no longer pretended surprise at each other’s secrets: when Bev called him cold-voiced from her car after months of Tom’s isolation, Eddie had simply asked where she was, driven to her, and held her hand tightly as she shook through brackish sobs, stale like they’d been sitting for years in broken pipes. When Eddie had told her through two Vicodin and a shot of whiskey that he was ending it with Myra and why, she’d simply opened the door for him and held him on the couch as he vomited up a stomachache she’d long suspected that he had.

In some small way, it was a relief to talk to her like this. To check his phone under the table at lunch when Richie texted that Eddie’s one o’clock was here early but “i gave him a juice box and some crayons and he stopped fussing,” and to have Bev ask mischievously what he was smiling at. 

Once he knew that Richie wanted to be loud and difficult all the time, there was something precious about the quality of his quiet. The way his face couldn’t rest as he concentrated. How he’d blinked blearily in the early morning, in that particular way Eddie learned meant he’d had a show the night before.

And Eddie is also definitively not stupid. He may have been pulled around like a ragdoll for the first twenty-four years of his life, by one domineering woman and then another, but he’s not naive. He knows Richie liked him more than most other people in the office, or maybe just differently. He can feel the back of his neck burn sometimes, and when it does, he knows he could turn to catch Richie looking at him. But that wasn’t an excuse for Eddie playing jump rope with professional boundaries. Eddie could fire Richie, if he wanted, and that made him off-limits. He’d rather cut off his hands.

Not that he was perfect. He’d brush past Richie slightly too close and pretend not to notice, or else he’d flirt with him shamelessly at the Christmas party, white-lying about having three drinks instead of two to explain away his behavior. He’s not crossing any ethical lines, really, but he’s blundering over his own little lock-it-down tripwires at an alarming, perhaps increasing, rate.

This is all to say that Eddie expected to have mixed feelings about Richie leaving.

He anticipated; he prepared in whatever small ways he could. He started looking for a new hire early, to save himself stresing over the transition—which he would still do, of course, but it was worth a shot. The new Richie was named Alma, and she was capable and quick and sincerely familiar with Microsoft Office, not lying about it the way everyone else did. And she wasn’t the most polite person Eddie had interviewed, either, which was a purposeful choice; he tended to flatten polite people like Godzilla flattening Tokyo.

When the day came, Eddie was fine, in theory: he contributed to the going-away gift and signed the card (Thanks for everything, and good luck. You deserve this, you dick), and if he found reasons to stay in his office while Richie packed up and a last-minute errand to run during his send-off party, it was just because he didn’t want it to be weird. Like they’d have to—mark the occasion, somehow—or—Eddie wasn’t really sure, but he thought about saying goodbye to Richie, formally, and he just got this anxious twinge he chose not to unpack.

And he’d still seen Richie as he left, of course, because why not. Richie had looked soft and sad in a sprawling way, too big for the airlock, which felt wrong. It made a wordless fear push up under Eddie’s lungs. Richie was getting out, moving up—Eddie had meant it when he said Richie deserved that—he should be smiling and burnished and already mentally gone. The realness of him standing there in the small space made Eddie worry. He was glad for the cardboard box between them.

He meant it also when he said they could be friends now. He thinks.

In the days after Richie leaves, it seems wrong to look out of his office and see Alma, which makes sense, because she’s so new. And she’s short, and she actually has fantastic posture. For a few weeks Eddie tries getting to know her to make the unease go away: he discovers that she’s an aspiring writer (everyone here is an aspiring something), that she lives with her sister, that she’s outdoorsy and likes to hike. It helps.

Then, because Adrian mentions it in passing, he goes on dates; he’d let himself work-wife Richie and now he needs to get off his ass and grow up and stop using the promotion thing as an excuse to never go out, and then he’ll stop feeling so weird. Probably. Right?

He trawls the apps until a couple of things click into place—a short blonde guy who manages a theater, a tall dark-haired one with a job as boring and corporate as Eddie’s. The dates are okay: he doesn’t freak them out, and he doesn’t hate them, and the blond one is sort of a cinematically good kisser, but he still unlocks his apartment door with a quiet click and walks inside alone, feeling scooped out and sad in a way that exhausts him.

And finally, he brings it to Bev like a supplicant pilgrim, laying his personal life as an offering on the diner table between them.

“I dunno, I’ve just been really—weird, ever since Richie left. Like, Alma is great at her job, and everything else is fine, I just feel like maybe I’m scared of change or whatever. It doesn’t feel like I miss a friend, you know, I could just text him, and it’s a little embarrassing to be all mopey that my office eye candy is gone. I mean, it’s been more than a _month_.” He looks at Bev’s silverware, at rest over the top of her scraps of waffle, rather than her eyes.

Bev sighs. “Well, if you miss him, why haven’t you texted him?”

Eddie scrunches his eyes shut and takes a long drink of water. “I don’t know, it feels kinda loaded? Like, hitting up the employee you had the hots for right after they quit?”

Lovingly, Bev kicks him under the table. “You didn’t _have_ the hots for him, Eds! You had the _wants_.”

She looks so pleased with her wordplay that Eddie bites easily. “All right, Marsh. What the fuck are the wants?”

“Pretend Richie’s here. Or not _here,_ necessarily, but say you’re going to see Richie for like, four hours. What do you wanna do?”

Eddie huffs a breath and glances around the restaurant. “I mean, like, ideally I’d see his dick.”

“And?” Bev presses.

“And, I don’t know, I’d ask him if he has any new weird comic stories; all kinds of shit would go down at the places he performed and it was really funny to hear him talk about it. I really wanna know how he’s feeling about his career, I mean, he must be happy about it, but I wanna know if it’s like he thought, and what parts he likes. And I’d wanna tell him you’re getting dogs; he’d care about that. And I want him to make some kind of dumb annoying joke about my mom or my height or my clothes. And then we’d probably make out again. And I’d like, smell his hair or something stupid.” Eddie pauses. “Would that add up to four hours? Maybe we should also get food.”

Bev taps her fingernails, short and pearlescent and perfect, against her water glass. She flicks her eyebrows at him.

Eddie grimaces.

“You don’t wanna have sex with him, Eddie, you just _want_ him. Period. You see the difference. Like, what might we call it when you get along with someone and also you want to screw them and buy them dinner?”

He pillows his head in his arms. “Yeah, I hear it.”

“No, I’m going to enjoy this. What would you call it if you miss a guy and want him to hold you in his big strong arms and tell you about his day? Eddie—” and he feels her grab his forearm. “Eds, look at me.”

He does, grabbing her middle fingertip in his fingers like it’s a lucky rabbit’s foot.

“You’re not being weird, or a creep, or dysfunctional,” she says, fixing him with her big I-know-you eyes. “You have a crush on your friend Richie and I think you should call him.”

Eddie sits up and breathes deeply, checking his sleeves for any ketchup stains lifted off the table. “Thanks, Bev,” he says. “Really.”

She nods magnanimously.

Eddie doesn’t, of course. Call Richie. They’re not thirteen, first of all. And he just wants to sit, getting used to the idea, its shape and size. And of course, he doesn’t know what to do, either. Ask him to—to hang out? Hey, remember me, the guy that used to ride your ass—pardon my word choice—about everything? Any chance you’d be interested in sitting next to me at a bar and letting me overanalyze how often our knees touch? He lets a week go by, then two, and he feels a creeping despair as the gelatin of his own indecision starts to solidify around him.

So when Stan mentions in passing that Richie’s having his first solo show in a couple of days, Eddie jumps before he even really thinks about it. He has to comb through a couple of Facebook pages to find the theater, but the name of the show makes him laugh: Roadside Annoyance. He knows, even as he buys himself a ticket, that going to a comedy show for a cute guy doesn’t usually end well.

Still.

He has to at least _try_.

The evening of the show is clear-skied and hot, horizon wringing out the last rays of light from the sunset as Eddie dips into the theater. It’s more of an event when Los Angeles is cold, but still, something about the temperature and the hour makes Eddie feel wired, teenaged and credulous, like school is out and he has his driver’s license. Like things are allowed to him. He had wondered over the past few weeks exactly how deep his interest in Richie went, whether two years of a crush crept into the territory of something else, and it feels less melodramatic now to admit that maybe it does.

The theater is closer to small-ish than truly small. The marquee out front breathes a flush of golden light into the evening air, studded with big black plastic lettering that promises Richie’s presence. Eddie finds himself both proud and relieved: Richie Tozier is becoming a big deal, and, both consequently and conveniently, he does not need to know that Eddie was here. He strides past the bar in the lobby at first, then doubles back for a gin and tonic. They give it to him in a glass with a protective lid, like an adult sippy cup, and that is the first joke of the evening that makes Eddie laugh.

His seat is toward the back of the theater, a few seats away from the aisle. Normally he likes to sit directly on the aisle, close to an exit—maybe not the healthiest habit in the world, but the price his brain demands for letting him go to a theater at all—but that seemed like unnecessary exposure. Sure, it was normal to go to a work friend’s show, especially in L.A., but Eddie still doesn’t know how he’d explain himself if he saw Stan or Mike here. They’re perceptive, the two of them, and he’s fucked because he is immediately struck by how charming it is that Richie Tozier, of all people, sought out no-bullshit friends.

He manages to finish his first drink and go back to the bar for a second one before the lights go down. He thinks they make announcements about cell phones and exits, and that there’s some kind of opener, a dark-haired girl with spitfire energy, but he can’t say for sure because seeing Richie walk out on stage wipes his memory of everything that’s ever happened to him besides this.

At work, Richie had been informal and gawky, and his dress shirts and pants had always been wrinkled, little physical badges of the fact that he did not fit perfectly into his job. Round peg in square hole, you know, except then he’d at least been bound by some kind of business etiquette. Seeing him onstage is like seeing a new person. He’s putting on a persona, Eddie knows that, but it’s Richie as he wants to be. In an eye-searingly bright Hawaiian shirt and dark jeans and sneakers, fratty but sincere, he grins that enormous uneven grin and makes Eddie’s breath feel hot in his chest.

He moves differently, too, finally occupying every inch of his six-foot-something frame, taking up the whole stage. For the first few minutes of the act, Eddie can’t really process language, but he reads Richie like a morse code, long strides alternating with little hops and curls of emphasis. His energy isn’t as popcorn-high as the opener; instead, he calmly collects all the bits and pieces of his jokes before he lobs punchlines out, rapid-fire, to the corners of the audience.

And, to Eddie’s relief and consternation, he’s funny.

“—I know I’m a sadsack, and let me tell you know I know this,” Richie says. “So I’m at my friend’s wedding. My best friend, Stan—he’s here somewhere; he hates my guts—he got married recently. Yeah, _woo_ for that bigger than you _woo_ ’d for me quitting my office job, I see how it is. You wanna like Stan even more? He asked me, his comedian friend, to be his best man. Fucking nuts. The balls that that takes. Anyway, I gave the speech, didn’t bomb it, and now I’m kind of plastered because that’s what you do to recover from talking about your feelings in front of, like, three different rabbis. Okay, so picture this, the first dance is happening, I’m seven drinks in, and I’ve lost the plot of this whole event hard enough that I’ve started to think about dicks. You remember my hot boss from earlier? Dark hair, kinda short, kinda mean to me, has one of those triangle-shaped torsos, but in a respectable way, not a freaky way? Yeah, I’m not gonna draw that line for you, but here’s the crayons.”

Eddie’s ears burn, and he sinks down in his seat as if there’s a way for Richie to see him past the bright lights and the seventeen rows of people in front of him. Richie’s attraction to him is maybe not new information, but it makes his pulse start zagging like a firefly.

“And then one of Stan’s aunts—hold on,” Richie continues. “I want to really paint this picture for you. Who here has seen _Love Actually_ ? Yes? I should’ve known, that was iconic representation for sadsacks. So, not the plotline with Liam Neeson, right, and not the one with Hugh Grant, but the one with the sheriff from The Walking Dead? Where he’s like, in love with the best friend’s wife? Incredible sadsack. Truly a god among men. Anyway, there’s this scene where a lady walks up to this dude at the wedding between his best friend and the girl he’s in love with—you can unclench, everyone, I’m gay, remember—and she’s like _do you love him?_ Because he looks so goddamn pathetic that that seems like an appropriate fuckin’ question. I know you’re at the guy’s wedding, and we’ve never met each other, and who knows if you’re into dudes, but do you love him?! And the dude’s like _no_ because actually he loves the wife, whatever, that terrible posterboard scene. Now back to me. I’m staring in the general direction of Stan’s first dance, I’m thinkin’ about dicks, I’m drunk, I’m holding a beer bottle in a way that probably looks a little slutty, and Stan’s aunt who I guess has probably seen _Love Actually_ too many times _comes up_ and _asks me_ —”

He lets the audience go insane on their own, bonking the microphone into his forehead a few times.

“Yeah! Uh-huh! And I have to look this old lady in her eyes, her big sad grandma eyes—” he matches this moment with a creaky feminine voice and a kicked-puppy facial expression— “and she has _just_ had the most socially forward-thinking moment of her life, this is a huge accomplishment for a boomer, but I have to look her in the eyes and be like.”

He takes a moment to grab the water bottle and lean on the mic stand as if he’s drunk. “Well, I see that you think that I’m in love with your grandson or whatever, but this hangdog horny facial expression is actually just because he looks kind of like my boss from the back. But that wasn’t—” he waves his hands at the crowd as if to stifle their laughter. “No, that wasn’t even the moment I knew I was a sadsack! No, I knew because I told that whole story in therapy the next week, and I think the exact words that came out of my mouth were _but thankfully I was just fantasizing about my boss_ , and I hear my therapist, the man I pay a couple hundred dollars an hour to trick me into having higher self-esteem, just quietly go—” he inhales on a hiss, very close to the microphone— “ _oh my god.”_

Eddie briefly considers staying after the show to say hello, or something stupid like that, but ultimately decides against it. Surely Richie has his friends to talk to. Or maybe Eddie’s just feeling a little bit cowardly. Maybe this was a weird, pushy thing to do.

Instead, as Eddie spills out with the rest of the crowd into the just-cooling night, he texts Richie. 

Eddie (11:04 p.m.)

_I can’t believe you were actually funny all along._

He managed to find street parking less than a block down from the theater, so he’s just taking his keys out of the pocket when his phone starts buzzing again.

Richie (11:06 p.m.)

_U came??? Oh my god u came to my show didn’t u_

_Warn a guy jesus fuck_

Then his phone starts buzzing with an incoming call, and Eddie’s hands are suddenly very twitchy, but he manages to answer just before he drops the phone on the ground. “Fuck me,” he says, stooping to pick it up, and he only loses strength in his legs a little bit when he hears Richie’s voice, tinny but pitched low, from the receiver.

 _“Well, if you’re sure,”_ he says.

“Oh, shut up,” Eddie snaps, standing and dusting himself off.

Richie _tsk_ s. _“You just paid money to see me talk, Eduardo. I’m not buyin’ it.”_

Eddie just sighs.

 _“So, you came to my show,”_ Richie says, as if asking for confirmation.

“I did.”

There’s a park across the street, just a little sliver of green space, and the chirp of crickets almost drowns out Richie’s little _huh_ on the other end of the line. Eddie looks up toward the pale-orange mercury lights, the opaque sky beyond them, stars timidly hidden.

 _“Wait, are you still here?”_ Richie asks.

Eddie blinks. “I mean, I left the theater, but—”

 _“No, wait, wait, hold on, hot stuff, I think I see you,”_ Richie says, and he hangs up, leaving Eddie to stand up straight, phone still pressed to his ear, and look around frantically—first back towards the door of the theater, but Richie’s not there, and then around at the emptying street. Then he hears a metallic bang from the alleyway next to the theater, and Richie rounds the corner, tripping over his own sneakers and smiling in a way that puts Eddie in mind of fireworks. His hair flops around his ears as he runs, and it should look stupid, but it just makes Eddie feel crazier and crazier as he gets closer.

“Hey,” he says as he skids to a halt in front of Eddie, chest moving under his shirt, running a hand back through his hair as if there’s an order to put it back in. He’s so close and so _much_ that Eddie involuntarily takes a half-step back, nearly tripping over the curb. Richie grins somehow wider at that.

Eddie’s own smile pushes at his mouth like a cat nudging her owner’s ankles, irrepressible when Richie’s around. “Hi,” he says, and just to be contrary, “What are you smiling about?”

“Happy to see you,” Richie says simply.

Eddie softens easily, blooming like a flower under the attention. The teenaged feeling is back, the allowed-ness, so he looks up at Richie as innocently as he can and asks, “But don’t you see me in your fantasies enough as it is?”

Richie laughs, loud and pleased, slapping the top of the parking meter. “Oh, I should apologize for that joke,” he says. “You’re just good material, man.”

A spark catches in the bottom of Eddie’s stomach. “Don’t,” he says seriously, and Richie’s eyebrows flick up. “Apologize.”

Richie sucks in a breath and runs a hand over the back of his neck. “Shit, I forgot what the eyes are like in person.”

Eddie ignores that, because he will die if he doesn’t, and simply says, “Well, I’m always here if you run out of—jokes.”

“Yeah, I remember you saying something about that.” Richie takes a half-step closer, and Eddie steadies himself against the door of his car. “About being friends now that you’re not in charge of me anymore.”

“No, you’re remembering wrong,” Eddie says. “I’m pretty sure that I said you should date me.”

It’s a risky pitch, a little curve to it, but Richie makes contact with it anyway. A cheshire-cat smile, body close enough that Eddie can feel the extra heat. “Date, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s when all my really funny neuroses come out,” Eddie says, and he reaches for Richie, and Richie says “oh perfect” and kisses him.

It’s like being held close by a dream he had and forgot about: Richie’s hand cradles the back of Eddie’s head. His lips taste sharply of beer. His shoulders, under the stupid Hawaiian shirt, are a little damp and a lot tempting and Eddie can feel the roll and pull of the muscles in them as Richie snakes a hand around the small of Eddie’s back and tugs him closer. Eddie tilts his head in a question and Richie answers it, lips and teeth and tongue, for a moment, before he pulls back and says “Hold on. Uh, wait a second.”

“What?” Eddie says, squinting as he tries to look at Richie’s face without letting go of his hair. He looks nervous, and Eddie’s suddenly aware that his arms ache a little, like maybe he’s holding on too tight. He rolls back down onto his heels, hands on Richie’s upper arms instead. He tries to make them light. “Richie, what’s up?”

“I’m just trying to figure out a way to say this without sounding like a complete freak, but uh.” He doesn’t let go of Eddie’s waist, but he glances up into the space over the car, across the street. “You’re not expecting me to be casual about this, right? I mean, is it okay that you—that I really like you. Like, if that’s the situation. For me.”

His eyes finally travel back to Eddie’s, then down, somewhere around his collar. Eddie feels a swift movement in his ribcage, a kick like a bass drum pedal snapping forward: he has both hands on Richie but is drowned, all over again, by the need to touch him. He grabs Richie by the jaw and kisses him on the mouth, right where he can see that he’s biting the inside of his lip.

“Yeah, Rich,” he says when they are finally looking at each other again. “That’s okay.”

Richie just holds him there, eyes clear and dark like lakewater. Eddie tries to push it all into his expression, pictures a can opening or a pillbug uncurling to walk. “I’m not, uh,” he starts again, then runs a thumb across Richie’s right cheekbone. “I am _really_ not fucking around here. With this. Is that okay with _you_?”

He cannot make himself say _I think I’m in love with you_ out loud, but something in Richie’s face, bracketed between Eddie’s hands, smooths out anyway.

“Zac Efron,” he says fondly.

Eddie blinks. “Zac Efron?”

“That’s who I want to play me,” Richie says, as if this makes perfect sense. “In the movie they make of this.”

And it’s all there, Eddie thinks in a kind of fervor, the streetlights and the crickets and the way Richie looks, hazy and pleased, glasses pushed up onto his head. It’s just right.

“You sure it shouldn’t be that guy from _Love Actually_?” Eddie asks, to make Richie kiss him again.

Richie laughs and gathers him up by the ribs and obliges.


End file.
